The Orlando Sentinel has announced that it will end its contentious mugshot gallery series, effective end-of-day Friday, June 12.
“We’ve come to realize that without context, the galleries have little journalistic value and may have reinforced negative stereotypes.”
– ORLANDO SENTINEL
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The announcement follows a trend of policy updates from newspaper companies across the country, including Gannett, sharing that they would no longer be publishing mugshots and going so far as to pull mugshots from previous years as well.
Critics have often opposed the posting of mugshots as they are shared without context and can be extremely harmful to a person’s reputation and completely disregard an American’s most sacred principle of law that a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Orlando Sentinel will continue to cover crime stories and will use mugshots in their reporting to support evidence of them being arrested.
If you don’t want your mugshot in the paper there is a really easy way to keep that from happening… Don’t break the law. Couldn’t be easier.